Great efforts have been spent by the automotive industry to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Also, because of regulatory requirements, research continues to reduce emissions of internal combustion (IC) engines, regardless of whether they are powered by conventional gasoline, diesel or natural gas fuels.
In a typical gasoline automobile, the catalytic converter helps to reduce the harmful emissions, but such reductions can still be improved substantially. One of the biggest shortcomings of the catalytic converter is that it only works at a fairly high temperature. When an engine is cold, the catalytic converter does almost nothing to reduce the emissions at the exhaust.
Various attempts have been made to burn hydrogen and fossil fuel mixtures in IC engines in order to reduce harmful emissions but none have been commercially successful. Although these engines may operate to provide the intended results of lowering harmful emissions, the cost of retrofitting existing IC engines using these systems has made their deployment prohibitively expensive. In addition, if such engines were to be adopted, they would require a constant low cost source of low emission fuel, which will not happen unless a market for such fuel is present.
Attempts have been made at combining hydrogen with natural gas in an IC engine wherein gaseous hydrogen and natural gas were held in particular proportion in the same fuel tank. If the fuels are in the same tank, then an existing IC engine cannot perform well under load because the hydrogen displaces the critical amount of natural gas needed for optimal power. Since hydrogen stored in the same tank with natural gas cannot be selectively substituted, a dual fuel mixture such as this would inhibit engine power and performance when required by the vehicle.
No known systems have been successful beyond experimentation, possibly because they did not properly address the ability of existing engines to accept dual or new fuels, the stoichiometry of blended fuels, lack of electronic control capability and most importantly, little or no attention as to whether or not the resultant application could be commercially viable (i.e., whether it could attract auto, oil, government and consumer participation).
Makers of IC engines have rejected these technologies as not being either cost effective or effective at all in reducing emissions.
The reason that no one has invented a commercial hydrogen blended dual fuel retrofit system to reduce emissions in today's existing IC engines is because the economics of hydrogen fuel production and delivery have not been incorporated to attract industry and finance to thereby create a market for hydrogen fuel.
Other attempts have been made at applying hydrogen fuel cells to motive power. Unfortunately, a fuel cell requires hydrogen at up to 99.9999% purity, which is exorbitantly costly; moreover, fuel cells cannot operate on a blend of hydrogen and conventional fossil fuel—which is the essence of making a market transition from today's fossil fuel based economy to tomorrow's hydrogen economy. This notwithstanding, fuel cells will inevitably be a major part of the hydrogen future.